Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (39 page)

‘Well, I want a little insurance. You’re going to write down
a full confession to the murder of Sylvia Dewar. Everything you’ve told me, but also all of the specifics about times and dates. Oh, and I want your fingerprint in ink next to the signature. Again, no lies or bending the truth, or you’ll never tiptoe through the tulips again.’

‘Wait a minute … I can’t do that … they’ll hang me.’

‘Only if I give it to the police. If everything goes well with making withdrawals from the accounts, then you’ve nothing to worry about. And, anyway, a confession under duress isn’t admissible in court.’

‘So …’ said Annan, still rat-clever and cautious despite his situation, ‘what you’re saying is if you get the money, you burn that?’

‘Is it a deal?’

‘How do I know you’ll burn the confession?’

‘You don’t. You’ll just have to trust me. I’m Canadian after all. The clean living and maple syrup makes us grow up straight and true.’

Rubbing his raw, untied wrists, Annan’s little rat eyes darted about, as if looking for an escape route. Eventually, he started to write. Half way through he asked for a small red notebook from the pocket of his coat. Leaving him guarded by McBride, I got it for him, flicking through the pages and seeing rows of letters and numbers. It was some kind of cypher. Referring to the notebook, he scribbled down the details I needed.

He handed the sheet to me.

‘Now the confession. And I want all the details of the union scam in it as well.’

It was clear he saw no way out of it and he started to write. Every now and then I checked over his shoulder to make sure he was telling it how it was. When he was finished, both sides
of the sheet were filled with handwriting. I got him to rub ink on the tips of his thumb and forefinger and pressed them down on the paper.

‘Sign it and date it,’ I said. And he did.

He stood up slowly and painfully, handing me both pieces of paper. I checked them over again.

‘There you go, Lennox. You’ve got it all. Happy?’ A raw hatred peeked through the curtain of his fear.

‘I’m a cheerful kind of guy.’

Annan put his socks and shoes back on, each movement slow and stiff except for his fingers, which shook almost uncontrollably. Twinkle had scared him good, all right.

He straightened up and started to walk past me. I stopped him with a hand on his chest.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m not going to hang around. Or do you want me to come with you when you pick up the money … is that it? You’ve got the confession. You don’t need me any more.’

‘Oh, I think we do, Dennis.’

He looked from me to Twinkletoes. ‘What is this? I thought we had a deal …’

‘Well, that just goes to show you, you can’t trust anyone. You’ve been conned, Annan. We’re going to tie you up again, nice and tight, and tell the coppers where to find you. And we’ll give them the bank details and your confession.’

‘But that confession’s not admissible, like you said …’

‘True. But it points the police in the right direction to get evidence that they can use.’

‘You bastard!’ Annan looked like he wanted to hit me, but he was too yellow.

‘Yep, Dennis,’ I said, in a calm, conversational tone, ‘I’m going to give the police everything you’ve given me. You maybe won’t swing for Sylvia’s murder, but you’re going to spend a long, long time sleeping lightly in an eight-by-four cell with someone called Big Boabie who’s hung like a mule and gets frisky after his cocoa.’

I thought of Sylvia Dewar with her head smashed in, of her husband’s lonely walk up the stairs with a length of electrical cable. And I thought about all of the crap I’d been through. How chasing a ghost Frank Lang had involved me with a very-much-alive Ferenc Lang. Annan had no direct involvement with the Hungarian thing, but there would have been no Hungarian thing without him.

I wanted to give him a beating. One that he’d never forget. Instead I shoved him backwards and onto the chair.

‘Tie him up good and tight, Twinkle,’ I said.

Turned out I wasn’t that person any more, after all.

After we left Annan tied up again in his chair, I sat in the car, quiet for a moment, letting myself calm down. Twinkletoes sat silently beside me. When it came to the etiquette of violence, Twinkle was the equivalent of Barbara Cartland. After a while I turned to him and smiled.

‘Thanks, Twinkle, you did great in there.’

He beamed at me.

‘And I’ve got to hand it to you,’ I said, ‘your
psychological
approach with the bolt cutters really works. For a moment there even I thought you were going to start cutting off his toes.’

McBride looked at me vaguely for a moment, uncertainty in the childlike eyes beneath the Neanderthal brow.

‘You know … the way we were bluffing in there …’ I explained

‘Oh aye …’ he said eventually, slowly. ‘Bluffing … That’s right, the
piss-eye-co-logical
approach. That’s what we was doing.’

I smiled again and started the car up, making a mental note to be clearer in my intentions in future.

I asked Twinkletoes if I could hang on to the Cresta for another day or so and he said it was no problem. I dropped him off at his house. Before he got out of the car, he paused and turned his huge Easter Island face towards me.

‘Are you gonna be all right, Mr. L?’

‘Sure, Twinkle. Everything’s going to be fine. You’ve helped me clear up the Frank Lang thing. I don’t know what I’d have done without you. All I have to do now is sort out this other business.’

‘After that, is that you going to be in the clear and that?’

‘It is.’

‘And will you still want me to do jobs for you?’

‘Of course. You can count on it.’

‘Mr. Lennox … there won’t be any other stuff like today, will there? You know, with the bolt cutters? I’m sorry and that, but it’s just I’m kinda trying to put all of that shite behind me …’

‘Trust me, Twinkle, I know the feeling. And no, it’s not going to be like that again.’

He grinned and got out of the car.

I drove off, shaking my head in disbelief. An ex-gangland torturer, possible killer and all round thug had just expressed concern that I was perhaps the wrong company to be keeping.

After I dropped Twinkletoes, I stopped at a pay ’phone and called Jock Ferguson at his home. I waited while he bombarded me with curses, threats and then instructions about handing myself in.

‘I will,’ I said. ‘But I’ve still got unfinished business. And that’s what I’m ’phoning about. I’ve left a package for you. I’ll give you the address in a minute. It’s a long-firm fraud specialist called Dennis Annan, but you’ll know him as … well, as a matter of fact, you’ll know him by a couple of names. The first is Frank Lang, neighbour to the recently deceased Mr and Mrs Thomas Dewar. Except there never was any Frank Lang. It was all set up by Annan as part of his scam. The second name you know him by is Paul Lynch, Connelly’s deputy.’

‘Lynch and Lang are the same person?’

‘Yep. They’re both Dennis Annan.’

‘What was the scam?’

‘Frank Lang was supposed to be a shadowy go-between hired to deliver cash from a special fund on behalf of Joe Connelly’s Amalgamated Union of Industrial Trades – providing relief funds for labour and trades union organizations in oppressed countries. Except the labour organizations were bogus and the cash was being diverted to accounts for the non-existent Frank Lang.’

‘You have proof of this?’

‘The ledger with all of the details in it is waiting for you with Annan, who’s all trussed up for you like a Thanksgiving turkey. Oh, and his car is parked outside. It’s a green Morris Traveller, one of those jobs that looks half-car, half-garden-shed. If you show it to Maisie McCardle she’ll confirm it was the car she saw being used by the neighbour she knew as Frank Lang. By the way, Lang killed Sylvia Dewar. He’s signed a confession and that’s waiting for you too.’

‘Tell me where he is and I’ll meet you there,’ said Ferguson.

‘No can do, Jock,’ I said. ‘Not when Dunlop still has me in his sights for Andrew Ellis’s murder. You deal with Annan, I’ll deal with Ellis’s killers.’

‘You’re going to get yourself killed, Lennox. Come in and we can sort this all out.’

‘I’ve told you Jock, can’t do it. But if you want to do me a favour, there’s a guy called Larry Franks being held in the Newton Mearns cells for police assault. Get him out. And I don’t mean bail. He clobbered a copper to get himself arrested deliberately because … well, let’s just say if the story gets out it’s going to reflect badly on the City of Glasgow Police. I need this as a favour and you owe me one. And you’re going to owe me plenty
more when I’m finished. I know who killed Andrew Ellis and I’m going to find them.’

Ferguson started to protest, but I silenced him.

‘Everybody has been trying to cut out a piece of me, the police as well, and I’m too tired and too pissed off to argue. In the meantime, you go and pick up Annan.’ I gave Ferguson the address.

‘Lennox,’ he said, ‘if it’s any consolation, I’ve been trying to keep the heat off.’

‘I know, Jock, and it is. I have to go. I’ll talk to you later. But listen, when you pick Annan up, everything you need will be there with him, but I have to tell you he’s not looking any too pretty.’

‘Okay …’ he said. I could hear him take a breath to say something else, so I hung up.

I was still a hunted man. I had given Ferguson everything he needed to clear up Sylvia Dewar’s death, but no one had seriously been looking at me for that. They were after me for killing Andrew Ellis and – until I could find out what or where Tanglewood was and who Ferenc Lang was – I would remain the number one suspect for Ellis’s murder.

I headed back to the barge and cleaned up. I made up some sandwiches from the stuff McBride had brought me and ate them slowly, thinking through what I was going to do next.

I folded out Ellis’s map again, calculating times and distances. From his home in Bearsden, which was on the right side of the city, to the mark on the map and back, allowing for an hour’s meeting, the timings fitted with those given to me by Pamela Ellis. This was the regular rendezvous, not somewhere in Garnethill. They had changed venue the night I found Ellis with ‘Magda’ simply because of the smog, I guessed. Or maybe he had picked her up at the translation bureau to go on together to some other location. But this place on the map was their principal trysting point. I would have bet all my money on it.

The thought of money made me set to my next task. I took the wax-paper-wrapped bundles of cash in three denominations
and gave them a second wrapping in newspaper. I took the brown paper shopping bag McBride had brought the groceries in and cut it up to improvise wrapping paper. Before I wrapped the money up and addressed the package, I wrote a brief note.

Dear Mrs Ellis
,
The enclosed money was placed in my trust by your husband to be given to you in the case of his death or disappearance. His primary concern was always that you be catered for should something happen to him. He instructed me to tell you that under no circumstances were you to inform the police or anyone else about this money
.

Nothing can make up for the loss of your husband, but the enclosed was his way of ensuring some comfort in the future
.

Yours
,

A Wellwisher

I folded the note and placed it in the parcel before wrapping it up, writing the address and securing the package with string.

Then, after washing the dishes, I fell into bed. It was going to be a big day tomorrow.

My moustache was coming in well, and again I complemented the tweed and flannel outfit with the navy duffle coat before heading out to a camping store I knew about in the West End of the city. It was the kind of place that catered for the serious canvas-shelterer and I picked up a good quality bivouac, a camping stove and gas canister, a trenching tool, sleeping bag, as well as a kitbag and canteen. From the outdoor clothing section, I picked out the kind of pullover anorak favoured by Sir Edmund Hillary, archaeology field-trip students and
secondary modern geography teachers. My biggest expense, more than the tent, was a pair of heavy walking boots.

The salesman insisted I try them on with a pair of heavy socks and walk around the store with the boots on. I appreciated his professionalism: I already knew from my army days that the wrong size of boots could end up crippling you. In the army your boots, after your gun, were your most important piece of kit. What was more, my feet were still painful from my sock-soled flight across Glasgow and needed the best protection I could give them.

Adding three pairs of heavy socks to wear with the boots and an oiled wool turtleneck that would have stood up on its own, I picked out a pair of waterproof trousers and another flat cap, something I would normally not be seen dead in. I really was pushing my luck, making the salesman’s day by buying the whole camping caboodle. In November. And that meant he would remember me.

I fed him some baloney about buying the tent as a Christmas present for my nephew, and I was getting myself kitted out because, although I’d never been camping before, I had promised to take my nephew on a trip to the Trossachs in the spring, as soon as the weather improved. It was all a strain, because I went through the whole process putting on a vaguely Glaswegian accent. Or at least what I thought would sound like a Glasgow accent, but somehow came out more Boston Irish than anything else.

He’d probably remember that too.

When he took me to the cash desk to pay for the gear. I thought I caught the girl at the desk eyeing the bruises on my face, despite me doing my best to present everyone with my unblemished side as much as possible. The salesman was so
pleased with my custom that he insisted on helping me out with the stuff, ignoring my repeated assurances that I could manage myself by making a couple of trips to the car. I had deliberately parked the Cresta out of sight of the shop, but my continued insistence on carrying the stuff myself would soon become in itself suspicious.